Oh
@VeevaVee I completely agree regarding the view of the pitch, Old Trafford hardly has a bad seat. What I meant by the view was the view of the arena and the connection to your fellow fans and the feeling of being in a near 80,000 seater arena, from high up in tier 2 and above it's completely gone, your view of the arena looks like the following pics and the disconnect from fellow fans is a real own goal and part of the atmosphere issue in my opinion.
To further emphasise that point, when you sit nearer to the pitch (or if you stand at pitch level on the tour) and haven't for a while you forget just how fecking massive the North Stand is hidden underneath the roof. I remember being told on the tour way back in the 90s that if you took into account the whole of the North Stand including the corners in the first tier (at the time we hadn't built upwards for the quadrants) then it was bigger than Bolton's entire stadium that had recently been built. 27,000ish altogether and has been made bigger since.
Stretty and Scoreboard ends too are huge if you look at them individually but the roof hides it all.
Similarly if you're sat in the quadrants you get the full view of the size of the wrap around second tiers at each end that then blend (albeit, done really badly in the quadrants) into the third tier of the North. It's amazing looking round and seeing the full width and length of the ground.
OT doesn't look like it should be as big as it is because of the roof whereas if we had one like St.James' Park then it'd be properly imposing.
I'm not sure though that they actually could do a new roof. That in itself would cost a fecking fortune because it's all structural.
As for the rest. I think we'd all rather they modernised OT than built a new ground but there's only so much you can do to a stadium as old as OT is. It definitely needs a new paintjob because there are huge swathes of rust and flaking paint everywhere you look (the structure on the facade of the Stretty especially) and the concourses are in desperate need of an upgrade too. I've only been in the corporate seats once for the 7-1 Roma game back in 2007 but if it hasn't changed much then it'll be a very dated experience for the prawn sandwich brigade compared to our rivals both in England and in Europe. It reminded me of a local social club/function room from the 70's/80's whereas you look at some of the new stadiums and their corporate facilities and they look 22nd century in comparison. Doesn't matter for us povs but it does to the ones with the cash that actually matter.
OT does look very, very tired and that's before you tackle things like legroom which is appalling for most of the first tier bowl and lots of the second tier too. That sort of thing can't be fixed and might be a hinderance to standing if we eventually get the okay to convert seats into terraces.
It's still home and always will be but those in denial at how behind the times it is compared to basically every other big club are exactly that, in denial. It'll be worse when Barça and Real re-develop the Camp Nou and Bernabeu as well because they'll have done exactly what we should be doing.
